Focusing on the South African High Commissioners to Australia from the time the High Commission was opened in 1949 until 1961, when South Africa left the Commonwealth, this article tries to say something about the sort of person who once represented the country abroad, what some of them did in a given historical context, and indirectly, something about their employer, the Department of External Affairs, as it was called during the period covered. The article also touches on an early manifestation of the 1970s feud between the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Information, which ended only when the former absorbed the latter as an outcome of the so-called "Information Scandal" that so beguiled political and public opinion in South Africa in the latter part of that decade.